President Bola Tinubu has restated that the steps administration was taking to address the numerous social and economic challenges facing the country will soon start yielding results.
Tinubu stated this on Sunday in Lagos at the opening ceremony of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Annual General Conference.
The President, who was represented by Vice President, Kashim Shettima highlighted some the measures and policies being undertaken by his administration to address the economic challenges, saying that the collapsed of the multiple exchange regimes has help to check corruption.
Commending Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, who had advocated a new social contract in Nigeria where certain policies in the economy and society are sacrosanct and must not be touched or changed when administrations change, he said: “Fellow Nigerians, it is appropriate to refer to the recent landmark position of the Supreme Court granting financial autonomy to the local government councils in Nigeria.
“I commend the upheaval for its consistent sustenance of the tenets of democracy and good governance in the polity.
“Expectedly, this will spur the much-desired developments at the grassroots level, while I remain confident that more of such strategic and reform-oriented legal interventions will be achieved.”
Speaking earlier, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala lamented that Nigeria was not presently where it ought to be as a nation, saying that part of the problem includes lack of policy inconsistency where every government abandons the policies of the previous administration.
She said: “A very important part of the explanation for why we’ve not been able to succeed is lack of policy consistency. Successive administrations fail to continue good economic and social policies put in place by predecessors. Allowing politics to frame policy, what we can call the not-made-in-my-administration syndrome.
“We all understand that where policies are bad and not working, of course politics should intervene. But where things are working to the good, we ask, why fix what is not broken? To minimize the volatility of economic and social policy and to set our country on a steady growth and development path, rather than an episodic growth path, I have become increasingly convinced that Nigeria needs a social contract.
“By this, I mean a fundamental cross-party, cross-society agreement that certain things in the economy, in the country, in policy and in society are sacrosanct and shall not be touched or changed when administrations change.
“Every one of us here in this room knows that Nigeria today is not where it should be, that our country has not progressed as it should have.
“That is why, more than 60 years after independence, the NBA and all general conferences are still looking at things like rebuilding Nigeria.”
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